Researchers and educators have long argued for the importance of providing time and space for rich conversations around literature. This column draws on research to consider how teachers make room for these discussions inside their classrooms. Particularly, the authors consider different dimensions along which teachers might examine and grow…

This "Conversation Currents" features JoBeth Allen and Valerie Kinloch discussing their thoughts and experiences working with families and communities. Allen bases her comments on the belief that programs have to be adaptable to many different constituencies and demographics, and so must be recreated every year with every teacher and…

This article honors Kathy G. Short, who has been awarded NCTE's Outstanding Educator in the English Language Arts award for 2011. Kathy's scholarly achievements as a lifelong inquirer, teacher, and mentor are featured in this article, celebrating her national and international influence in the field of literacy education. (Contains 1 figure.)

This column features two prominent literacy scholars, Catherine Compton-Lilly and Eve Gregory. They discuss their recent research studies in various contexts and describe the reciprocal relationships between school, home, and community literacy practices.

This article is an historical study of the understanding of children's writing through "Language Arts". The author and her research team did a content analysis of articles about writing that appeared in "Language Arts" beginning in 1924 through January, 2010. Analysis shows that a major area of tension throughout the history of…

And so a middle school language arts teacher begins her Saturday. Before coffee, Facebook. In this themed issue on professional development in an era of nick.com, the authors propose that teachers' new literacy learning is as close as their own screens. Teachers, too, live literate lives online in this new age of composition, with impulses to…

This essay addresses issues central to educational discourse in the United States by calling on texts and forms of inquiry generally unfamiliar and often unrecognized in current conversations regarding schooling and education, the Jewish tradition of Talmudic studies. Although Rabbis in this tradition never doubted the necessity of standards,…

Reading experts have consistently cited the importance of independent reading, reading for pleasure, and fostering "a love of reading." Unfortunately, fanning the fire of fan readership is not so easy in the service of our clear-cut and standards-aligned curricula, except perhaps in small, carefully channeled doses. Moreover, the impetus for such…

Stories are woven so tightly into the fabric of our everyday lives that it's easy to overlook their significance in framing how we think about ourselves and the world. Stories are meaning making, providing a means of structuring and reflecting on our experiences in order to understand their significance. Story is also life making, a way of…

A preservice teacher wants to teach for social justice, but faces challenges effectively engaging in critical pedagogy. Her class of sixth-grade students wants to examine more closely the issues around immigration, and the author is eager to disrupt any one-dimensional stereotypes of immigrants that the students might have picked up from popular…

For four years, Pat Paugh, a university teacher educator, and Mary Moran, a teacher researcher, collaborated on action research by systematically studying literacy development connected to the latter's third-grade community gardening and urban farming curriculum. Their goal was to support an existing classroom culture that valued…

This article offers a way of thinking about literacy instruction that critiques current reasoning, but also provides a space to dynamically think outside of prevalent practices. It presents a framework for both planning and studying literacy pedagogy that combines a practical everyday model of the reading process with Michel Foucault's (1988c)…

This article honors Karen Smith, who has been given NCTE's Outstanding Educator in the English Language Arts award for 2009. Through the voices of many colleagues and former students, the article celebrates Karen as a teacher, learner, mentor, collaborator, scholar, storyteller, and visionary thinker and doer.

NCTE's Framework for 21st Century Literacies (2008) prompted collaboration between a university professor and classroom teacher resulting in a professional inquiry project utilizing a Web 2.0 tool, Scrapblog, with fourth-grade students. This article describes implementation of this project, including both challenges and positive outcomes. The…

Utilizing a New Literacies Studies framework, this article presents critical lessons in film production from a multiple site case study. Examples of children's classroom experiences demonstrate how filmmaking and play come together in a process of storying--a collaborative and multimodal approach to text composition. Students in both preschool and…